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Superb cuisine/world class chefs. Better than a cruise ship - priced the same. CaribbeanIWorldwide. 1-800-213-0465 of college age-and she hit it off with Volpe. "I like that Joe started off at the bottom, just like me, and now he's running the company," she says. Volpe eXplained that he wanted an assistant manager who would be to him what he had been to Bruce Crawford. It was not that simple, however. Billinghurst's skills direcdy overlap those of Jonathan Friend, the Met's artistic administrator and Levine's most im- portant ally at the Met. Though Friend remains at the Met with his job title unchanged, Billinghurst's arrival obvi- ously means a diminished role for him. Friend was only twenty-seven, and an employee in the Met's rehearsal depart- ment, when, in 1983, Levine offered him the job of artistic administrator, a powerful position that involved collabo- rating with Levine on casting decisions, and then seeing that those decisions were implemented. Friend brought a number of useful skills to the job, in- cluding a prodigious memory-he can rattle off with ease the cast list of an op- era performed at the Met ten years ago. What he did not bring was indepen- dence; Bruce Crawford has described the casting process at the Met as one in which "Jonathan proposes and Jimmy disposes." Levine, who does not alto- gether dispute that description, says, "Very few people appreciate what a suc- cess Jonathan has made of that, to bring to negotiated reality whatever vision I might have had." Billinghurst already has ideas of how she will affect the Met. In January of this year, she was a judge at the Rimsky- Korsakov vocal competition in St. Pe- tersburg, and has a broad acquaintance with singers in the former Soviet Union who might be appropriate for Met pro- ductIons. She hopes to develop a creative alliance between the Kirov Opera and the Met, as she did previously between the Kirov and the San Francisco Opera. She has travelled extensively to theatres all over the world, and wants to recruit new stage directors; her view of what is an appropriate mise-en-scène for Met productions may prove to be somewhat broader than Levine's. "Over the next few years, I thInk you'll see several more interesting, and less conventional, new productions at the Met," she says. "They will be controversial. Some of the Met audiences will like them, and some will hate them." Billinghurst is also a firm proponent of English titles at the Met, which, at the insistence of Bruce Crawford, are to make their début next season. The San Francisco Opera has had titles for years-and so have other major opera companies, including Chicago's Lyric Opera, the Paris Opéra, and Covent Garden. In 1985, Levine told the Times critic Will Crutchfield that titles would be used at the Met only over "my dead body," and he says the comment is still applicable if one is ta1king about titles projected over the proscenium-the sys- tem that is generally in use. But the Met's proposed system, if it works- to display the titles on two-Inch-by- eight-inch screens mounted above seat backs-is less objectionable, he says, be- cause the titles will not be imposed on anyone who doesn't want them The screens can be switched off, and special filters will make the text almost invisible to one's neighbor. Billinghurst is careful to point out that, whùe she may have been recruited by Volpe, "I report just as much to Jimmy as I do to Joe, and I will be equally loyal to both of them." In fact, she says, people who expect her to drIve a wedge between Volpe and Levine will find her doing precisely the opposite. She is well known as a conciliator-it was she who saw to it that Kathleen Battle made it through her tension- filled engagement in "La Fille du Régiment" in San Francisco. "I am very good at bringing people closer to- gether," she says. "And I am perfectly capable of saying to Jimmy and Joe, 'Lis- ten, you two-you have to agree on thi ,,, s. In any case, the future of the Met and Its fifteen hundred employees will de- pend on how well those two remarkably dissimilar men can develop a modus oper- andi. Levine, who calls himself a "glass- is- half-full person," is typically optimis- tic. Ronald Wilford, a more saturnine personality, says, "I don't want Jim Levine to be the sole arbiter of everything at the Met. I'ill all for Joe taking responsibil- ity I also think Joe should take some heat when it comes." Because the Met plans its seasons so far in advance-rep- ertoire and casts have already been cho- sen through the spring of 1997-it may be a whùe before a change is apparent. Still, it is safe to predict that the Met is going to be a different place .